Abstract
Visual attention is strongly affected by the past: both by recent experience and by long-term regularities in the environment that are encoded in and retrieved from memory. In visual search, intertrial repetition of targets causes speeded response times (short-term priming). Similarly, targets that are presented more often than others may facilitate search, even long after it is no longer present (long-term priming). In this study, we investigate whether such short-term priming and long-term priming depend on dissociable mechanisms. By recording eye movements while participants searched for one of two conjunction targets, we explored at what stages of visual search different forms of priming manifest. We found both long- and short- term priming effects. Long-term priming persisted long after the bias was present, and was again found even in participants who were unaware of a color bias. Short- and long-term priming affected the same stage of the task; both biased eye movements towards targets with the primed color, already starting with the first eye movement. Neither form of priming affected the response phase of a trial, but response repetition did. The results strongly suggest that both long- and short-term memory can implicitly modulate feedforward visual processing.Electronic Supplementary MaterialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1021-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Since the visual environment is too rich for our visual apparatus to fully process, we are constantly confronted with the problem of which parts of a visual scene we must select for further processing, at the expense of other information
The same a b manipulation in singleton search tasks did not yield any long-lasting effects, even when search was rendered inefficient. Because of this strong dissociation, we proposed that different priming mechanisms dominate in both types of search: whereas priming in pop-out search may be dominated by short-lived feature weighting as described by Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994), priming in conjunction search would be largely driven by the retrieval of memory traces—in particular by those formed recently or frequently, resulting in short- and long-term priming
Long-term priming did not attenuate over the course of a neutral block, which was supported by strong evidence against an interaction between long-term priming and subblocks ( 1/BFL:B = 37.8 )
Summary
Since the visual environment is too rich for our visual apparatus to fully process, we are constantly confronted with the problem of which parts of a visual scene we must select for further processing, at the expense of other information. The main focus of the study of visual attention has long been the interplay between these two classes, and the question to what extent one can overrule the other (Chun et al, 2011; Van der Stigchel et al, 2009) This extensively studied dichotomy does not seem to cover all factors that affect visual information processing. An example from experimental psychology illustrating how memory affects visual attention is formed by intertrial priming, a phenomenon that was first thoroughly explored by Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) In their experiments, participants searched for a red or green singleton diamond among two diamonds of the opposite color, and responded. Two mechanisms have been proposed to contribute to these effects: (1) temporarily changes in the abstract ‘weights’ of target and distractor features (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994; Maljkovic & Martini, 2005; Lee et al, 2009), and (2) automatic and implicit retrieval of memory traces of past trials, facilitating search when they match present experience (Hillstrom, 2000; Huang et al, 2004)
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